Hack and refill a Stratasys Dimension 3D printer

Dan owns a Stratasys Dimension SST 768 3D printer. But the price of P400 ABS material cartridges for the 3D printer can cost up to $260 each. And one spools of ABS in the market costs less than $40-50 per kg. So, Dan decided to hack and refill his own P400 cartridges.

Usually a printer keeps track of how much material has left in a cartridge through an EEPROM chip which is encrypted by some unique value and the printer itself.

What Dan did was to pull out the hard drive from the 3D printer and made an image of the drive using a program called "dd". Then he load the image of the hard drive in a virtual machine. He changed the root password and made some necessary edits to enable SSH. Then he took the newly created, compressed image and loaded onto the printer's physical hard drive.

When the hard drive is put back into the printer and turned on, the printer should boot and you should have SSH access to it. The the script he wrote will overwrote the cartridge's EEPROM chip with its previous 100% dump/value, the cartridge is ready to be used again.